The Color Brown
The Color Brown
a love story
In the early years of my fishing experience I became interested in making lures out of our Porcelain clay body that we used for our line of gift and dinner ware in our pottery business. I started showing my early prototypes to the owners of Lihue Fishing Supply Shiro Kanemaru and his wife Kimie. They were supportive and gave me some great feed back and a lot of encouragement. After 10 years of experimenting and developing my line of ceramic surface plugs and trolling lures I had asked Shiro if there was any particular color I should focus on? He was very old at the time and would sit in a chair by the glass display case in the store. Anyway, his reaction was quite memorable as he became very excited and rather emotional about emphasizing the color brown. He said “BROWN!, brown is the most important color!" I said ok, I’ll do some brown colored lures. I had several brown glazes, so I started doing a few plugs and heads in the brown glazes. They were a big hit with the fish and the fisherman slowly started to use them also. Ok, so brown is a well proven color as we all know. I use to use the “Motoroil” 2” curly tails. I loved that color! So fast forward ten or so years. We are now in our 10th year in the lure business. We no longer make pottery, which was hard for us to give up after 40 years. I had noticed the poppers of a very talented lure maker here in Hawaii, Ladd Yoshimura of Lunchbox lures who was making some trophy lures out of Koa. The one I saw on Facebook was just incredible in it’s color and grain patterns. So seeing that gorgeous piece of wood so beautifully crafted got me thinking. I wonder how a natural colored wood in my new bar shape would look and how would it work?
So I asked my wood worker friend Dean Mayor if he would copy my shape of the 3.5 oz bar in some really hard and heavy wood. He chose Kauwila. For those of you who don’t know of this wood, it is an indigenous species and one of the hardest of native woods. It was used in place of iron for O’o’s (digging sticks) and weapons. Ok, I get the sample and wire it up. I go down to one of my favorite labs where I never have caught anything over a pound and on the second cast, boom! hookup/fish on. I’m stressing big time cause this fish is probably going to cut me off even though I have a 20’ leader/served connection I feel like the lure will be lost. After about 3 minutes I get the fish close and think I got him and then he spits the lure at my feet. I am so thankful I got this special lure back. So there begins the 1st step of this new journey in wood lures. I have collected wood from all over the world and many species from here in Hawaii. Stay tuned.
a love story
In the early years of my fishing experience I became interested in making lures out of our Porcelain clay body that we used for our line of gift and dinner ware in our pottery business. I started showing my early prototypes to the owners of Lihue Fishing Supply Shiro Kanemaru and his wife Kimie. They were supportive and gave me some great feed back and a lot of encouragement. After 10 years of experimenting and developing my line of ceramic surface plugs and trolling lures I had asked Shiro if there was any particular color I should focus on? He was very old at the time and would sit in a chair by the glass display case in the store. Anyway, his reaction was quite memorable as he became very excited and rather emotional about emphasizing the color brown. He said “BROWN!, brown is the most important color!" I said ok, I’ll do some brown colored lures. I had several brown glazes, so I started doing a few plugs and heads in the brown glazes. They were a big hit with the fish and the fisherman slowly started to use them also. Ok, so brown is a well proven color as we all know. I use to use the “Motoroil” 2” curly tails. I loved that color! So fast forward ten or so years. We are now in our 10th year in the lure business. We no longer make pottery, which was hard for us to give up after 40 years. I had noticed the poppers of a very talented lure maker here in Hawaii, Ladd Yoshimura of Lunchbox lures who was making some trophy lures out of Koa. The one I saw on Facebook was just incredible in it’s color and grain patterns. So seeing that gorgeous piece of wood so beautifully crafted got me thinking. I wonder how a natural colored wood in my new bar shape would look and how would it work?
So I asked my wood worker friend Dean Mayor if he would copy my shape of the 3.5 oz bar in some really hard and heavy wood. He chose Kauwila. For those of you who don’t know of this wood, it is an indigenous species and one of the hardest of native woods. It was used in place of iron for O’o’s (digging sticks) and weapons. Ok, I get the sample and wire it up. I go down to one of my favorite labs where I never have caught anything over a pound and on the second cast, boom! hookup/fish on. I’m stressing big time cause this fish is probably going to cut me off even though I have a 20’ leader/served connection I feel like the lure will be lost. After about 3 minutes I get the fish close and think I got him and then he spits the lure at my feet. I am so thankful I got this special lure back. So there begins the 1st step of this new journey in wood lures. I have collected wood from all over the world and many species from here in Hawaii. Stay tuned.